A History of Ancient Britain (26 page)

Stonehenge was eventually a cemetery for burnt bone; but at the time when Knowth and Newgrange (and the neighbouring passage grave of Dowth) were being built, such a rite was highly unusual.
This was an innovation of Neolithic society and the remains found at Knowth are some of the earliest evidence of ritual burning ever found.

Forensic examination revealed that the remains of perhaps 121 people were placed inside Knowth during the course of a period as long as three centuries. With just one cremation every two to
three years, it was clearly an unusual event, one presumably reserved only for people regarded as special. The likelihood that the rite was restricted to the few – together with
the discovery of that prestigious mace-head – strongly suggests it was an honour bestowed upon those who in life had occupied the very highest stratum of Neolithic society.

Put simply, if you were important then your mortal remains were consigned to the flames of a great pyre. Presumably it also meant that those practising the cremation believed the spirit, the
soul of someone whose body was treated in that way, was being sent somewhere different as well. Lesser members of society were left behind on Earth to be buried, or just picked over by the
crows.

With the help of two Dublin firemen – professionals more comfortable extinguishing blazes than deliberately starting them – I conducted my own experiments in the art of cremation in
the very shadow of Knowth. The destruction of a human body by means of fire is no easy task and a temperature of around 1,700 degrees centigrade must be maintained for several hours to get the job
done. With that effect in mind we carefully built a square tower of timber, layer upon layer of branches criss-crossing one another, until we had a fairly solid pyre. For good measure we had
incorporated some straw bales at the centre and these we doused with petrol.

For want of any human volunteers, I visited a local butcher and acquired the carcass of an adult pig weighing around 11 stones. (About a third of that was fat and Donal, one of the firemen,
explained this was key: although the wood, straw and petrol would get things going, the main fuel for a cremation is provided by the body itself.) After much struggling, during which I came fully
to appreciate the meaning of the term ‘dead weight’, we managed to position the victim on top of the pyre. Given the lingering smell of petrol fumes it was with some trepidation that I
at last stepped forward, armed with a lit blowtorch, to ignite the whole. There was a satisfying ‘whump’ of combustion and then slowly, reluctantly the flames took hold.

As it turned out, the burning took many hours and as the sun set behind the great mound of Knowth there was nothing but time – time to reflect on what such a ritual must have meant to
farming communities 5,000 years ago. Our modern sensitivities are such that we have ordained that our cremations must happen out of sight. It is a quite different experience, therefore, to watch
what actually happens. As night came on, the glow from the pyre became hard to look at. The heat was intense and overwhelming, almost frightening to see on such a scale, and quite soon the body of
the pig became less distinct, less identifiable as that of an animal.

Within an hour it was easy to imagine a human body was being consumed, turned into smoke. The smell of roasting flesh was pervasive too, strangely sweet, but in spite of
it I found the process oddly comforting. There was something clean about it all as well, as the flames got about their work and a grey column rose high into the dark.

Ultimately I was left to wonder what impact all of this would have had on people reflecting upon the life of a great leader, or a priest, as something ethereal parted from the body and flew
away. Next morning there would be nothing left and the sun would rise into a day and a world from which the priest was utterly absent, the body consumed and reduced by around 12 hours of burning to
only a cupful of brittle fragments.

During the later part of the Neolithic a new society was emerging in Britain and Ireland. It dictated what objects a person might possess in life and also how the body would be treated in death.
Assumptions were being made and if there ever had been a time when people were truly equal, then that time had passed. Some of those people, the most valued and therefore the most powerful, were
now in the habit of making journeys far from home. Along with precious objects that might be exchanged or left behind in the special places, they also carried ideas that were to take root like the
seeds of a new species of plant. Enough was preserved – the monuments themselves and the things interred within – to enable us to glimpse the birth of a whole new concept of
existence.

The world had changed. Once there were only earthly concerns. First the hunters stalked their prey. The first farmers came next and tilled the fields or lay dead upon them in houses made of
stone. All eyes were focused on the ground, all minds preoccupied with what it might give, what it might take. Then those simple truths were left behind, or at least set aside by generations newly
transfixed by the sky, who believed their fates were written by the sun, Moon and stars.

From now on what mattered was forever out of reach. The best that could be done was to get up high, stand on tiptoes and stretch out a hand. Between 3000 and 2500
BC
people were making it plain, in the form of the monuments they built, that they had become aware of their place, not just on Earth but within the cosmos.

The tombs, the circles, the swirls cut painstakingly into the bedrock with tools of bone and stone . . . all these were about trying to make sense of the movement of the lights in the sky, of
the universe that shapes and governs our lives and our time on Earth. Those forces went way beyond the reach
of the ancestors – so much so that from now on, when some
people died, they were sent to a new place, a different place.

High among the Langdale Pikes, where people once climbed in search of magical greenstone, the land had seemed far away, while the sky was almost close enough to touch. It seems that during the
later Neolithic people first conceived of an idea that changed everything and endures to this day, that somewhere beyond the mountains, beyond the clouds – way out where the sun and Moon
lived their lives and made their endless journeys – was Heaven.

CHAPTER FOUR

BRONZE

Once upon a time there was more than enough for everyone – in Britain certainly, and in the rest of the world besides. It is hard to know precisely how many people there
were, however. Estimating, far less accurately calculating, the population of Britain or anywhere else at any given moment in prehistory is so devoid of certainty as to be little more than a game.
For one thing no one was counting yet and for another there was no way to down note any totals until as recently as five or six thousand years ago when people in parts of Asia began recording words
and numbers on tablets of wet clay, the birth of writing. In short, for almost all our time our species lived in ignorance of how very few we actually were, and therefore how fortunate.

Not any more. Now the consequences of our own fecundity, our ingenuity and productivity are impossible to ignore. The evidence is all around and pressing in from every side more irresistibly and
threateningly than
any Ice Age glacier. There are six billion of us
Homo sapiens sapiens
alive today – far more people living and breathing at the same moment
than the world has ever known before.

The most credible estimates suggest as many as 100 billion people have already lived and died, so that the six billion of us living on the planet now are actually less than seven per cent of
humanity’s total. None of us has ever really left the place either. All the atoms that were once assembled into those billions of individuals are still here – part of the living, or
peppering the ground beneath our feet, or floating in the air ready to become part of something new. At times it feels as though the world must be growing fatter with it all, layer by layer, like
an onion. Grass, trees and plants grow from the soil, then die and in time become more soil – good for the burying and hiding of more of the dead.

Old buildings, towns and cities are bulldozed so the rubble can become foundations for the new. Everything is buried in the end and those of us alive today are dancing on the ruins and bones of
everything and everyone that went before. We live on top of one gigantic rubbish tip, the detritus of all that has lived and died and been turned to mulch. But all of it has been here all along, in
one form or another. What happens is constant shuffling and reshuffling of the same deck of cards. Planet Earth is one giant reprocessing plant and we, and all the rest, are just temporary
manifestations of the stuff of which it is made. And so it goes on and somehow the planet has coped, neatly disposing of the dead while providing the living with everything we have ever needed.

In planetary terms it has taken no time at all for us to crowd this particular dance hall with a mass of heaving, sweating humanity. If we allow for four or five generations per century then we
are, at most, only the 500th generation to have walked the Earth since people first recolonised northern Europe after the melting of the ice 10,000 years ago. The same basis of calculation means
there have been no more than 150,000 generations since the very first hominid stood upright three million years ago. For the majority of that time, despite the fertility of all those generations,
we were few and very far between across the country, let alone the planet.

But for all that, we are now finally and undeniably too many. The day will surely come, and soon, when the latest empty mouths and naked backs demand food and clothes from the world – and
the world will have nothing more to give.

For all the time we hunted and gathered the world was a bountiful place.
The herds and shoals were as numerous as grass and the fruit bowed all the branches. Eventually
those first farmers of 10,000 years ago taught the trick to all the rest and from that moment we were doomed. One hundred and fifty thousand generations have passed since then and yet it has taken
only the last few to ruin it all.

The population of Britain is just 60 million – a mere one per cent or so of the world – and for now, some of them at least are blessed with space in which to live and breathe. But 60
million is still a huge figure – by far and away the greatest density of humanity ever known in the archipelago.

The archaeologist who directed my first dig, in Ayrshire in the west of Scotland in 1985, was only half-joking when he suggested the Mesolithic population of Scotland might have fitted, at
times, inside one double-decker bus. Even the most generous estimates of the hunter-gatherer population of Britain in the centuries after the final retreat of the ice run to no more than the many
hundreds, or at most a few thousand souls.

By any measure it was an almost empty land and the natural resources must have seemed limitless – wild animals for meat; hides, feathers, furs and sinews for clothing and shelter; bones,
antlers and horns for tools; wild foods of every kind; trees for timber and bark; plant fibre for strings and ropes; flint, chert and pitchstone for axes and blades of all kinds, other stones for
hammering, crushing, grinding; amber and jet for jewellery.

But sometime towards the end of the Neolithic someone somewhere made a momentous discovery – in its way more momentous even than the discovery of farming. Where before we had made do with
what the physical universe had given us, now we were about to alter its forms. We had already tamed the animals and the plants and now we would warp and bend the elements as well. Call him or her a
genius, or a visionary, scientist, magician or meddler, but the result was the foundation of the world we live in today. It was the discovery of metal – and that metal-making was regarded as
having the stuff of dangerous magic about it is clear from all the associated legends and stories.

Wayland’s Smithy is the name given to a transepted passage grave of the Cotswold Severn type just over a mile from the famous Uffington White Horse, in Oxfordshire. Wayland is an English
corruption of Wolund, the name of the semi-divine blacksmith of the gods, but the Germanic legend likely came to Britain with the Anglo-Saxons, several thousand years after the tomb was actually
built by Neolithic farmers. At Wayland’s Smithy the local story goes that any rider whose horse throws a shoe must bring the
animal and tether it to the capstone.
Provided he or she leaves a silver coin for Wayland’s trouble, they will return next day to find the horse reshod and the money gone.